BGH overturns judgment against IS returnee Jennifer W.

IS returnee Jennifer W. is threatened with a harsher sentence because she left a Yazidi girl chained to death in Iraq in 2015 in the scorching heat without intervening. The Munich Higher Regional Court (OLG) had sentenced the woman from Lohne in Lower Saxony to ten years in prison. The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in Karlsruhe partially overturned this judgment on appeal by the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office.

There are far-reaching legal concerns that the Higher Regional Court has accepted a less serious case, said the presiding judge, Jürgen Schäfer. W. was convicted in Munich in October 2021, among other things, of crimes against humanity through enslavement resulting in death.

Another criminal division of the Munich court now has to negotiate the amount of the penalty again. In the remaining points, the judgment against the 31-year-old is final. Their revision was rejected by the highest criminal judges of the BGH.

Jennifer W.'s Iraqi ex-husband, who chained the five-year-old to a grate in the yard as punishment, has already been sentenced to life imprisonment, also for genocide. He had bought the girl and her mother as slaves after they were abducted by the terrorist organization Islamic State (IS).

Yazidis are Kurds from Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. They form a religious minority. In 2014, IS overran the region around the Sinjar Mountains in northern Iraq. The jihadists killed more than 5,000 members of this religious community. Women and girls were abducted, enslaved and raped. The Bundestag recognized the crimes as genocide in January.

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